


Collect call, Berlin to Risenberg and back again.

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Earth, Alternate Universe - World War II, Antisemitism, Can be read as alternate Winry Rockbell and Sciezka, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, It's pre-World War II era Germany, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, The author is not an expert so take everything with a grain of salt, or even the entire fucking shaker maybe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>February 27th, 1933. The beginning of the end. The end of everything, really, as Winry Rockbell and Sciezka Brzenska should have damn well known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collect call, Berlin to Risenberg and back again.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt G4 on my bingo card, "Historical AU". Set in a vaguely post-CoS, slightly altered version of pre-WWII Germany. Despite doing some surface-level research, I'm not an expert on WWII, particularly not the pre-WWII period, so my sincerest apologies if I fucked anything up!
> 
> Risenberg is a reference to the fact that "Resembool" is technically a mistransliteration of "Rizenburu", which, considering Amestris's roots in both Britain and Germany, was most likely supposed to be Risenberg or Risemberg rather than the nonsensical "Resembool".
> 
> Sciezka is Jewish. Winry is not. Winry calls her "Shesh" due to the cuteness factor.

On the twenty-seventh of February, Winry Rockbell stepped into a booth in front of a cozy café, sewed up her ragged breath, and phoned her lover from the public line. The first two rings passed unanswered. Frantically she clutched the dark receiver painfully close against her ear as though her agony could somehow pierce through the static between Berlin and Risenberg.

At long last, a click. Winry nearly screamed. Words tumbled out of her throat in harsh whispers that left the inside of her mouth red and raw.

Papers shuffling. The quixotic undercurrents belied by an adorably Polish accent slowed the aching thuds in her chest. “ _I’m fine, I’m fine!_ ”

Inhaling to calm her singing nerves, Winry pressed onwards: “The rumours were true. Listen to me; you’ve _got_ to get out of there.”

“ _It’ll blow over. I’m sorry to hear about the fire. Haha, I’ve never been too lucky with fire, to be honest . . . remember the fire that destroyed the library? That was the worst. Oh, I say fire too much. Perhaps they should even fire me!_ ” Her tone slung into a hammock of dreaminess, and a surge of relief hollowed the steel knot in Winry’s belly and escaped in an exhalation. “ _I’m still certain that extraterrestrials must have been involved. Oh, did I tell you about this new volume I picked up? It’s an account of an actual abduction, written by a very trustworthy Russian woman who_ —”

“Shesh?”

Her lover paused. “ _Mm?_ ”

“I’m out of change. I’ll call you from the train station. When I arrive. Is that all right?”

“ _Mmhm! I missed you, Win-win._ ”

Static, drowning out all the noise in the world. Winry rested the receiver in the slot. “Yeah. You too.”

 

On the thirtieth of March, Winry dropped by the records department. Maria Ross greeted her by the door. “Could you let off Sciezka tomorrow?” she asked quietly.

“No can do. It’s a work day like any other.” Yet the woman’s visage had darkened and creased. The knuckles of her hands, fingers tight on the wood of the clipboard, had become white as bone.

“I see.” Shaking her head, Winry felt the whorl of blonde unfurl, falling messily onto the back of her neck. “Thank you anyway, Mrs Ross. Take care.” With a final nod of gratitude, she shouldered open the door.

“Wait.”

Winry glanced back, the door heavy on her upper arm. Ross coughed into the nook of her elbow. “Miss Rockbell, I don’t mean to intrude upon your personal life, of course, but if I may ask?”

She lowered her eyelids to half-mast. “Of course.”

“You’re twenty-four, aren’t you? And unmarried. Not that women have to marry, of course.” Ross lingered on the trembling edge of her question. “But you and your, ah, friend seem awfully close.”

“Of course,” Winry repeated for a snapshot of time in which to weld her nerves to steel. “Two unmarried spinsters. Rent’s cheaper this way.”

“So I’ve heard.” The women studied one another for a lengthy moment. Steadily a heat creeped onto Winry’s cheeks, her eyes widening and her brows arching further and further, until she forced the door. Her heels clicked noisily as she pushed into the hallway. Ross caught the door-handle. “Do take care, Miss Rockbell.”

The following day Winry barred her lover from work. By sunrise two storefronts had been broken into and raided, and by sunset the Jewish in town spoke of leaving while they could.

Winry brandished the tickets in her lover’s face. “Why not?”

Wiping her glasses nervously, she buried her nose in a fantasy paperback Winry had picked up for her during her last trip to Berlin. “I-I like it here. With you. And how could I move all my books? I love you.”

“Yeah. You too.” Winry slumped down on the wall, her knees buckling beneath her and her legs unfolding on either side of her hips. She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes until blood and stars danced across her vision. “But you’re an idiot, Shesh.”

 

On the eleventh of April, what seemed like half the fairly minuscule Jewish population of Risenberg boarded trains to some hoped-for asylum beyond the indistinct sweep of the horizon. Not that anyone could ever reach the horizon.

The rest privately scoffed at the fleeing Jews’ fears. Winry held her lover’s hand in public now, keeping her gaze fixed on some distant point she refused to call the horizon and her feet moving on towards the same distant point she refused to call unreachable.

 

On the eighth of May, Winry returned from the briefest trip possible to Berlin to discover her lover digging in the backyard beneath the pale light of a new moon. Her heart dissolved into cast iron, her tongue into ice. While they wrestled over the shovel, Winry demanded to know: whose grave? Whose grave had been carved into the garden, whose death had marked black dirt over the vegetables they had grown together for years, whose remains had desecrated the very centre of the roses bushes, the scarlet around the grave merely a physical signature of bleeding corpses and weeping heavens?

Her lover choked on tears. Winry embraced her. They knelt in the garden, surrounded by dying flowers and withering leaves, as the world spun madly on. “They’re burning the books,” her lover whispered in broken chunks of Polish between sobs that tore her throat and dashed Winry’s soul against the unforgiving shores of a sand of fragments of bone and crystallised teardrops. “They’re burning the books, and I’m hiding them. They _won’t_ burn mine. These—these books—and Den—and _you_ —” Her lover spasmed. Winry pulled her tightly inwards as though sheltering her from the raging tempest. And what a brave new world had risen from the ashes of the old. “—are _all_ I have—I love you—”

“Yeah.” She swallowed. “You too.” When her lover went to fetch the stacks of books one by one, Winry dug into the garden. Uprooted every last flower and every last budding seed. Filled the backyard with buried secrets, with skeletons in the closest, with covers covered and pages bound from now till the day they could return. _Would_ return. To reclaim what once was theirs.

The next day Winry called in to Berlin to quit her job as a mechanic. She locked the doors, latched the windows, and slipped back into her warm bed beside her lover. In the early morning light her lover’s hair had goldened into honey, her eyelashes two sable crescents brushing on the rise of her cheeks, her quiet sleep-murmuring and sleep-grinning and sleep-giggling worth all of the dark twilights of her life and beyond.

Through the window, the moon smiled like a scythe. Winry drew the curtains.

 

On the fourteenth of July, her lover ceased to exist in Germany, along with almost the last of Winry’s hope. Almost. She called Berlin from a public payphone. Pleaded. Cried. She could hear a dog whining in the background. The forged papers arrived within the week, and her lover boarded the next train in the station.

Seeing her lover clutching the suitcase in one hand and holding down her sunhat in the other, Winry felt her feet carry her forward, cleaving through the crowd with a single-minded purpose. Her fingers wrapped around her lover’s shoulder. Her lover turned, her irises shimmering wetly, as Winry cradled her lover’s soft jaw in her calloused palms, and then suddenly Winry was kissing her on the platform, in front of the universe, in front of the eyes of God, in front of the Germany that had threatened to tear them apart and simply shattered her beating heart.

“I love you,” her lover whispered.

“Yeah,” murmured Winry. Her tongue pulsed behind her teeth until her lover kissed away the snot and the tears and the pain that relented bit by bit from its torrential downpour of acid rain fading, however slowly, into the warmth of a fresh spring shower. “Shesh. I love you too.”

Her lover left a woman, a dog, and the long, lonely months of a winter that would last for thirteen years. And the world spun madly on.


End file.
